In Patagonia

by Bruce Chatwin

  ‘He exhibited a lot of skulls of the various races—Europeans, Asiatics, American Indians, Chinese, Negroes, Australian Blacks and finally the skulls of Bushmen. He said that, by measurements and size of brainpan, the Bushmen Pygmies were not the lowest of the human race by many points and that the lowest were the Australian Blacks.

  ‘The lecture was very interesting, but I noticed Old Roundabout looking very uneasy. Then he slipped under the table and crawled among the audience’s legs to the door. Once outside, he took to his legs and ran. I fetched him back but he struggled violently. I put him in his seat and had a lot of bother getting him to stay there.

  ‘Afterwards I asked Young Andrew, through an interpreter: “What did your father mean by running out of the lecture?” And this is what he said:

  ‘“My father has been to plenty of these meetings. He knew quite well when the ‘killing time’ was coming. He was sure it was very near when he ran. He ran because he was the oldest person there. So, of course, he would be the first to be killed.” ’

  76

  IN 1890 Charley married a New Zealand girl, Jenetta Rutherford, and between voyages fathered two boys and a girl. She was a tragic figure, worn down by loneliness and the English climate. Her husband’s attitude to marriage perhaps corresponded to the quotation I found in his scrap-book under the title This Freedom:It is the man’s part to sow and ride away; conception is the woman’s office and that which she receives she tends to cherish and incorporate within her. Of her body that function is her glory; of her mind it is the millstone. A man rides away, a tent-dweller, an arab with a horse and the plains about him. Woman is a dweller in a city with a wall, a house-dweller, storing her possessions about her, abiding with them, not to be sundered from them.

  By 1896 Jenetta’s health could take England no longer and she moved to Cape Town with the children. She died there on March 3rd 1897, of tuberculosis of the hip. Charley took the children back to live with his unmarried sister in Shrewsbury.

  77

  SIX MONTHS later he got his first command. She was the Mataura, a single-screw cargo-passenger ship of 7,584 tons newly built on the Clyde. She carried 20,000 bales of wool and the same number of frozen carcasses. She ran a few sails aloft to steady her roll to make steerage in a crisis, but she had no radio.

  The outbound voyage was uneventful and the company boisterous. His passengers were the New Zealand Shooting Team returning from the Kolapura Cup. On the night of their arrival in Wellington, the Mayor gave a soirée in the Drill Hall. Charley had diarrhoea, had lost his evening clothes and sat unnoticed at the back until his passengers called for a speech.

  ‘My Lords, Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I am grateful to have been the means under Providence of bringing these brave New Zealand warriors to their hearths and homes,’ and sat down.

  Nobody clapped but a tiny, wizened Frenchman, who said: ‘Capitaine, you ’ave make the best speech of the evening.’

  ‘Only if brevity be the soul of wit,’ said Charley.

  The Frenchman, whose name was Henri Grien, came aboard in the morning and asked for a free passage home in return for a half share in the patent diving dress he hoped to sell to the British Admiralty. He said it worked on the principle of the copper steam-hose. Anyone could go down to sixty fathoms in perfect safety, though the Danish diver, who first tried it out off Sydney Heads, was hauled up dead.

  ‘Why didn’t you go down yourself?’

  ‘Fool,’ said Henri. ‘If I go down in suit and he goes wrong, who is to say what is matter with?’

  Charley signed him on, not so much for the suit, but as a source of entertainment.

  “Ave been in communication with the spirit world,’ Henri announced one morning. ‘This ship will sink but all crew will be save.’

  ‘Quite so, Henri. Thank you.’

  About this time Charley had another communication from a woman onshore, who also dreamed the ship would go down.

  Half an hour before sailing, his friend, Captain Croucher of the S.S. Waikato, came aboard and asked for a man to complete his articles.

  ‘I must have a man. Give me anything in trousers and I’ll make him do.’

  ‘You can take that if you like,’ Charley pointed to the Frenchman swabbing the floor of his cabin. ‘Henri, pack your bag and get aboard the Waikato.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you understand? You’re going home on the Waikato?’

  ‘No.’

  Charley took him by the neck, ran him down the ladder, kicked him up the pants and had his baggage thrown on to the wharf. Henri ran for a warrant for assault, but the magistrate was at lunch and he ran back. As the Mataura backed out of Queen’s Wharf, he got abreast of the bridge and, mounting a bollard, shouted:

  ‘Capitaine, remember, there is trouble to eastward.’

  Charley saw some loose coal lying on deck and called to the Bosun: ‘Have a shot, Bosun. See if you can knock him off his perch.’

  The Bosun let fly a lump and ‘fairly knocked him off’, but Henri ran and stood on the corner bollard, yelling:

  ‘Remember, there is trouble to eastward.’

  ‘Have another shot, Bosun.’

  But the Bosun missed and the last they saw of him was a tiny figure waving its arms, still standing on the bollard.

  78

  ON THE following Sunday, Captain, passengers and crew were ending Divine Service in the Saloon. The Chief Engineer was playing the last hymn, when there was a bang and a shudder and the engine stopped in half a revolution. Many were thrown flat.

  Charley rushed to the bridge where the Chief Engineer soon joined him.

  ‘She’s completely ... She’ll never go again.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. She’s got to go again.’

  But the Chief shrugged and retired to his cabin for a drink. Charley relieved him of his functions and went down to inspect the damage. The engine room was a ‘frightful mess’; the pumps driven off the crosshead; the rocking levers and piston rods bent; and the pump’s spears and links all broken. There must have been some fault in the design, and even at the Board of Trade Enquiry, no one was quite sure what happened. Apparently the circulating water hadn’t escaped and the pump had come down on a solid body of water ‘which as everyone knows is not compressible’.

  The Second Engineer was less of a fatalist and succeeded in straightening some of the twisted metal and getting the engine to tick over. Charley rigged up some squaresails and, for three weeks, the Mataura limped along at four knots with the Roaring Forties behind her.

  The ship had orders to round the Horn, but if the engine packed up there, she’d be swept on into the South Atlantic. So Charley decided to risk the worst lee shore in the world and make the western entrance of the Strait of Magellan. Once inside Cape Pilar, the northern tip of Desolation Island, he had a good chance of saving the ship.

  At 8 a.m. on January 12th he called for the Chief Engineer, who had resumed his job. He explained they were on a lee shore and asked if he wanted to tighten the pump chains. The Chief said: ‘No. She’ll go another twenty-four hours as far as I can see.’

  At 11.45 in a full north-westerly gale with driving mist and rain, Charley sighted the Judges’ Rocks about half a mile distant. The ship was twelve miles south of her calculated position. He headed her up into the teeth of the wind to clear the Outer Apostle Rock lying off the Cape. But the gale buffeted her back and, as the rock drew up close, he took bearings and doubted if he’d weather it.

  At 2 p.m. the Chief came on deck and said: ‘The chains are wearing loose. We’ll have to stop.’

  ‘We can’t stop,’ Charley yelled.

  ‘She may go twenty minutes but no more.’

  Charley called his officers: ‘If she’ll go twenty minutes, she may go thirty. And if I make a fair wind by going inside the Outer Apostle, we’ll round the Cape before the engines give out. I know it’s dangerous, but any rock with less than twenty-six feet must break in this sea and there is no break.’


  He bore away and went inside. Ten minutes later the ship’s stern came down crash on a small pinnacle of rock. He felt the plates tearing off her and knew she was hurt badly. He blew the whistle to close watertight bulkheads, but the Chief had mislaid the spanner to close the tunnel doors. Water flooded the engine room and soon the fires were out.

  The coast of Desolation Island is nicked with short fjords. Through binoculars Charley saw a break in the cliffs, which he took for the Sealers’ Cove marked on his chart. The sails still gave him some steerage way and he made for the entrance. As the bay opened up, he saw an arm of sheltered water with a shingle beach at the end. ‘I’ll run her in there,’ he thought, ‘and save her yet.’ But the stern was all awash, the ship didn’t respond to the helm, she yawed sideways and stuck against the side of the passage.

  The bay was not Sealers’ Cove but another (on modern charts it appears as Mataura Cove and the rock as Milward Rock). They took to the boats and pulled into the inner harbour, sleeping in them that night with the gale roaring above. At dawn the Chief Officer led a party to get provisions from the wreck, but they came back empty-handed. Charley had to go himself and returned with 11 sheep, 200 rabbits and 5cwt of flour.

  ‘How did you manage it, Sir?’ the Chief Officer asked.

  ‘Well, Sir,’ Charley said, ‘the reason you couldn’t manage it is that you, Sir, are a coward.’ Thereafter relations were strained between the Captain and his officers.

  In the morning they rowed out to sea, but the gale was yet blowing and the men blistered their hands and they saw they would not round the Cape that day. Back at Mataura Cove, they began boiling the sheep and rabbits in galvanized buckets. Checking through the stores with the Chief Steward, Charley found two cases of jam which the ship’s boys had slipped in.

  ‘What in God’s name d’you think’s the use of jam in circumstances such as ours?’

  ‘But what could be better than jam, Sir?’

  ‘Steward,’ muttered Charley, ‘I suppose you’d better make jam rolls.’

  It was raining so hard they had to cover him with a tarpaulin or the dough would have been too thin.

  Two of the passengers were ladies, who had lost their box in the wreck, so Charley rigged them out with his own lambswool drawers and Guernsey frocks. Next morning the boats tried to round the Cape a second time but failed. At a council of war, Charley said he’d give it one more try and then head south along the coast of Desolation Island and enter the Strait by the Abra Channel. The officers said it was suicidal.

  Again the weather was foul and he signalled with the lady’s petticoat that he was going south. He reefed his lug and ran before the storm between the Judges’ Rocks and the shore. The officers did not follow and the surgeon, in Charley’s boat, reported them capsize one by one. Charley left them to their fate and went on, the boat shipping water up to the thwarts.

  Under the lee of Child’s Island they stopped at a sheltered beach, since Charley had promised the ladies a cup of tea at the first convenient spot. But when the men went ashore for firewood, the wind veered and breakers began rolling into the bay. Captain and crew had to strip and shove the boat out to sea : ‘Oh! It was cold. And the sight of all hands naked was enough to make a cat laugh. We were red as lobsters and our teeth chattering.’

  The ladies hid under a tarpaulin in the bottom of the boat while the men dried off, rubbing up against each other, naked, with a sail in between. Suddenly a cry came up from underneath : ‘Stop! Someone’s sitting on mother’s head and she can’t breathe.’

  By noon of next day, they were inside the Strait. They thanked Almighty God for their deliverance and settled down to a luncheon of soup, tinned salmon, boiled lamb and rabbit, boiled jam rolls ‘which were a trifle filling’ and coffee. In the afternoon they saw a Yankee schooner beating up the Strait. Her skipper offered to take the ladies to San Francisco, but they turned him down. Charley set two blankets as a spinnaker and the boat spanked down the channel towards Cape Froward.

  On rounding the Cape, the wind was foul again and all hands took turns at the oars, rowing up the last reach to Punta Arenas. In the afternoon of the third day, the S.S. Hyson of the China Mutual Company picked them up. They docked at 6.30 p.m. Charley put the passengers in the Hotel Kosmos; told the German manager to give them anything they wanted with money no object; arranged for the Chilean Navy to send the tug Yáñez to look for the men; and argued till midnight with the salvage merchants but failed to come to terms.

  Back at the hotel he barged in on the ladies.

  ‘I’ve come to congratulate you on your safety,’ he said.

  But the ladies didn’t stir.

  ‘Aren’t you going to shake hands?’

  Slowly, out from under the bedclothes came a single hand. Charley was suspicious and gave it a tug. He wrote in his diary:Behold! A bare arm followed. The landlord had done nothing for them and they had simply taken off their wet clothes and crawled in between the sheets.

  ‘Please, Captain,’ said the older lady. ‘Please don’t make trouble. We’re warm and comfortable now.’

  ‘I most certainly am going to make trouble.’

  He knew where the manager slept and woke him roughly:‘How dare you send those poor ladies to bed with no nightgear?’

  ‘Get out. I am in bed mit mine vife. How dare you? Get out at vonce!’

  ‘I don’t care where you are or who you’re with. But if you don’t obey me instantly, I can tell you where you’ll both be in a few seconds. I am putting my foot in this door. I shall count up to thirty, and if no nightclothes are passed out, it will be my painful duty to strip you and your wife of yours. One, two, three, four . . . ’

  Charley had counted twenty-five when the manager came to his senses and handed two ladies’ nightgowns round the door. He took them in triumph to his passengers and retired for the best sleep of his life.

  By morning the salvage merchants had reduced their terms to 80 per cent with 20 per cent for Lloyd’s. Charley refused and by twelve they said these terms included 5 per cent for himself.

  ‘Agreed,’ he said. ‘That makes 75 per cent for you and 25 per cent for the underwriters.’

  Don José Menéndez, who was the ringleader, came up and said: ‘Captain, you are one bloody fool. Why you not take the 5 per cent?’

  ‘I am working for the insurers and they will pay me.’

  ‘All the same, Captain, I repeat what I said. And one day you will find out.’

  79

  THREE HUNDRED and five years before Charley failed to weather Cape Pilar, Captain John Davis squeezed past it in the Desire:

  ‘The next day being the 11 of October, we saw Cabo Deseado (Cape Pilar) being the cape on the south shore (the North shore is nothing but a company of dangerous rocks and shoals). This cape being within two leagues to leeward off us, our master greatly doubted, that we could not double the same: whereupon the captain told him: You see there is no remedy, either we must double it, or before noon we must die: therefore loose your sails, and let us put it to God’s mercy.

  ‘The master being a man of good spirit, resolutely made quicke dispatche and set saile. Our sayles had not been halfe an houre aboord, but the footrope of our foresaile brake, so that nothing held but the oylet holes. The seas continually brake over the ship’s poope and flew into the sayles with such violence, that wee still expected the tearing of our sayles, or oversetting of the ship, and withall to our utter discomfort, wee perceived that wee fell still more and more to leeward, so that we could not double the cape, and so near the shore that the counter-suffe (counter-surf) of the sea would rebound against the shippes side, so that wee were much dismayed by the horror of our present ende.

  ‘Being thus at the very pinch of death, the winde and the Seas raging beyond measure, our Master veared some of the maine sheate and whether it was by that occasion, or by some current, or by the wonderfull power of God, as wee verily thinke it was, the ship quickened her way, and shot past that rock, where we thought s
he would have shored. Then between the cape and the poynt there was a little bay so that wee were somewhat farther from the shoare: and when we were come so farre as the cape, wee yeelded to death; yet out good God the Father of all mercies delivered us, and wee doubled the cape by about the length of our shippe, or very little more. Being shot past the cape, we presently tooke in our sayles, which only God had preserved unto us and when we were shot in between the high lands, the wind blowing trade, without an inch of sayle, we spooned before the sea, three men being not able to guide the helm, and in six hours were put five and twenty leagues with in the Streights, where wee found a sea answerable to the Ocean.’

  From The Voyages and Works of John Davis, ed. Albert Hastings Markham, 1880, pp. 115-16.

  80

  CHARLEY’S MEN did not drown. Their masts had carried Caway but the boats did not capsize. They rowed back to Mataura Cove, rounded the cape on the first fine day, and fell in with the Yáñez.

  Charley spent two months on Desolation Island salvaging the wreck, before sailing to England to face the official enquiry. He knew he’d be out of a job. The New Zealand Shipping Company didn’t give wrecked captains a second chance. But already the weird magnetism of the South held him and his head was full of money-making schemes.

  His first plan was to advertise English and American products by lining the Strait of Magellan with blue and white enamel billboards. These were not principally for the benefit of steamer passengers. He intended to write illustrated articles in the international press calling the public’s attention to ‘the desecration of beautiful scenery by advertising fiends’.